Down To Earth

This is a real
life story of the world’s three wicked
problems, one opportunity and a new way to
confront global challenges.

Climate change, we know
enough to say emphatically, is a wicked problem.
It was in 1992 that the world started its formal
journey to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with
the signing of the UN framework convention on
climate change in Rio at the Earth Summit. More
than 20 years later, not much has changed. The
weather is becoming more unpredictable, more
extreme and we are all at risk. Worse, the world
is failing to negotiate how it will share economic
growth that is intricately linked to CO2
emissions.

Air pollution in our
cities is another wicked problem. It was in the
1990s that Delhi started its journey to clean its
air. It changed its fuel to compressed natural
gas, which emits much less emissions than
conventional fuels like diesel. It used cleaner
fuel to run its public transport vehicles. But
even as this happened, the number of private
vehicles surged. Worse, the use of diesel
increased. As a result, pollution is back with a
vengeance.

After years of the world
becoming “modern” as many as 2.67
billion people—over 40 per cent of the
world’s people—still burn biomass in
their inefficient and dirty cook stoves. This is
another wicked problem. Efforts to provide clean
energy for cooking began in the early 1980s, when
the world was worried, not about the pollution
from stoves, but about the prospect of losing
forests because of firewood collection. This did
not happen in a country like India. Even today
rural and poor Indians, constituting 75 per cent
of the population, use inefficient stoves and
inhale toxins that are now understood to be the
world’s number one killer.

So, how do these three
wicked problems come together? The answer lies in
the dark core of the particulate matter called
black carbon, which is emitted by diesel vehicles,
cook stoves and brick kilns. Till recently,
particulate matter was understood to be a local
pollutant. Today we know that a fraction of it
comprises black carbon, which can absorb heat and
warm up the surrounding atmosphere. It is,
therefore, not just a local pollutant, it has
global warming impacts. The extent of its warming
potential is still being debated, but the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
has doubled its estimate of warming from black
carbon aerosols from its previous report. So, the
opportunity is one of co-benefit: reduce emissions
from diesel vehicles and cook stoves, and get the
additional advantage of combating climate
change.

How much and how? Anil
Agarwal Dialogue, 2015—an annual event
organised by the Centre for Science and
Environment in the memory of its founder-director
and environmentalist— discussed this earlier
in March. The key issue that emerged is that the
world needs to act differently; it must recognise
that global action will be
local.

In other words, the
world must recognise that black carbon is a local
pollutant and that action must be directed to
address its local health concern. The co-benefit
agenda is important but incidental. In addition,
it must be clear that black carbon must not
distract the world from the agenda to cut CO2. We
know that CO2 has a long life in the
atmosphere—once emitted it stays for roughly
100 years and, therefore, determines the
temperature change in the long term. Black carbon
has a short life of less than eight days, so any
effort to cut it brings immediate benefits. More
importantly, black carbon cannot become a proxy
for real action to cut CO2. Nor can it be used to
shift the blame and burden to the developing
world.

It is also clear that
action on black carbon must differentiate between
the luxury emissions from diesel vehicles and the
survival emissions from cook stoves of the poor.
Not only because politics demands this, but also
because science preaches this. The fact is that
diesel emissions have a higher share of
light-absorbing black carbon that has a definite
warming impact. Biomass-based cook stoves have a
higher proportion of organic carbon that scatters
sunlight and cools the
atmosphere.

While luxury emissions
have to be targeted aggressively for both local
and global benefits, survival emissions of the
poor need supportive and enabling action. And even
if this action requires countries to provide LPG,
the fossil fuel energy for cooking, then they
should do so. The poor’s energy needs cannot
be held to ransom, when the world’s rich are
addicted to fossil fuel and are the cause of
catastrophic changes in our climate. What this
does suggest is that the world can do things
differently. Today, it is the world’s poor
who are not yet in the fossil trap. They can
drive, cook or build homes in the cleanest and
greenest manner.

This will, however,
require global leaders to “do
leadership” differently. Not what we see
today: national concerns masked by a global
front.